Pride and Prestige: Jane Austen and the Professions

College Literature, Summer 2009 by Drum, Alice

In Jane Austen's early novels, major charac- ters for the most part derive their identity from their landed interests, just as their fam- ilies have for generations. The focus of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Northanger Abbey (1818) is on a leisure class that includes among others, Sir John Middleton of Barton Park, John Dashwood of Norton Park, and Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, with a great deal of emphasis on their property and little sense in contemporary parlance of "what they do." The answer to that conundrum does not lie in a career or profession as modern readers might expect: occupation has little conse- quence for Austen's early gentry protagonists as long as there is income from their respec- tive properties and inherited wealth to sup- port their gentlemanly pursuits, large country houses, and families. Although the owner of a great estate might spend some time supervis- ing his property, the bulk of that activity falls to an estate manager. There is the occasional reference to a profession, but readers learn little about those professions that are mentioned in the early novels: Edward Ferrars will eventually become a vicar but only because he has lost his inheritance; Colonel Brandon was in the military, but there is little talk of his military career and considerable conversation about his estate. Nevertheless, despite Austen's apparent disregard for the professions in the early novels, the professions receive increasing attention in each successive entry among Austen's final works - Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818). Gentry life was never static, and these later novels reveal the changing occupations and preoccupations of the English gentry during the early nineteenth century when the professions were growing in importance and prestige.

Surprisingly, there has been limited critical acknowledgment of the progressive development of the change that Austen portrays in the later novels. While critics have recognized an emphasis on the clerical profession in Mansfield Park and a changing social order in Persuasion, there has been little recognition that social change and the professions are linked in both novels and in Emma. Janet Todd's excellent article, "The Professional Wife in Jane Austen" (2006) is something of an exception in that she recognizes the role of the professions in all three later novels, but her focus is on the professional's wife, not on Austen's portrayal of a leisure class beginning to give way to male protagonists who are highly involved in their professional pursuits.1 This progressive reading of the novels, and particularly of Emma, may appear counter to the prevailing critical view. That is not the case, but rather recognition that Jane Austen is a balanced social critic, who is able to promote the positive values of traditional gentry life, while showing at the same time and in the same novels that gentry life is evolving - and not necessarily for the worse. As Barbara Seeber notes, Austen's texts are dialogic and "to settle on one meaning is an act of authority that the text continually defies" (2000, 17). In that vein, it is worth recognizing one conservative element in the later novels: most major characters have strong ties to land transferred from one generation of a family to the next. Indeed, that setting in an older, agrarian world may be the reason that Mansfield Park and Emma represent for many readers and critics all that is stable and ordered in English country life. Alistair Duckworth has tellingly described Mansfield Park as the work of "an author, whose deepest impulse was ... to maintain and properly improve a social heritage" (1971, 80). In the same spirit, Christopher Brooke compares Emma to a detective novel where clues are liberally sprinkled about so that there will be few surprises at the end (1999, 99). While there is little reason to argue with the views of Duckworth and Brooke that Austen celebrates stability throughout her novels, there is, nevertheless, considerable evidence that she also portrays social change in Mansfield Park and Emma, just as she does in Persuasion.

The novels' publication history may also appear to work against the progressive reading posited here. Austen's six completed novels were all published in the nineteenth century and within a relatively short, seven-year time span, from 1811 to 181 8. Thus, the suggestion that there is any marked change in her portrayal of English country life in the later novels may seem surprising. In Austen's case, however, publication history does not tell the whole story of the novels' creation and may in fact suggest a congruence of composition and publication that did not exist. Although Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abby, and Pride and Prejudice were published in the nineteenth century, all three were written in the 179Os and begun even earlier. Despite Austen's revisions - in the case of Pride and Prejudice, a decade after the work was presumably completed - the early novels are true to their eighteenth century birth, and they chronicle life in an older, more static world. The change from that life to the world of early nineteenth-century England, as portrayed in Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, is the work of a mature, socially conscious writer, who could not ignore the movement from an agrarian way of life, where the primary form of identity is property, to a world in which gentry protagonists are actively involved with occupations other than the supervision of their landed interests.